Leave At Your Own Chosen Speed
by Stellaluna.3
Summary: Rory still saw Dean as a safe port in a storm. Jess couldn't be that for her. Not right now, not when he bore a closer resemblance to the storm itself. He was being dashed on the rocks of his own failures, and he couldn't save her while he was drowning himself. The bus ride to California is long, and there's no escape from yourself.


**This story is dedicated to everyone who has ever felt like people would be better off without you. Hold on. May you find your Philadelphia.**

 _Go away from my window_

 _Leave at your own chosen speed._

 _I'm not the one you want, babe_

 _I'm not the one you need._

 _You say you're lookin' for someone_

 _Never weak, but always strong_

 _To protect you and defend you_

 _Whether you are right or wrong_

 _Someone to open each and every door_

 _But it ain't me, babe._

 _No no no, it ain't me, babe._

 _It ain't me you're looking for, babe._

 _-Bob Dylan_

It turned out that Marquez couldn't hold his attention any better than his first choice of book had. He leaned his head against the window, his eyes vacantly watching the Western Pennsylvania landscape rush by in a blur. With every bump in the road the bus rattled over, his head bounced against the glass with a sharp _whack_. He welcomed the pain of it. It felt like justice.

He somehow felt a certain sense of inevitability about the whole mess, and wondered how he could possibly have expected or hoped things would turn out differently. He always managed to screw everything up. He struggled to remember why he'd ever thought he'd be good enough for someone like Rory. In the end, he supposed, the simple answer was that he'd wanted to be. From the day he'd met her, he just wanted to be with her, _needed_ to be around her. And she had seen something in him, a brighter future than the one he (and everyone else) had always predicted for himself. That hopeful, encouraging spark in her blue eyes had been so irresistible, he'd gradually started to believe it himself… only he slipped up, got over-confident and ruined everything.

"You can do more," she'd once told him. It had been that fateful night when he'd first felt the fragile blossoming of hope in his chest, only to have it end with her car wrecked, Rory broken, and himself catching the first bus away from her- a self-imposed banishment. It all seemed depressingly prophetic now. He should have stayed in New York.

"You can do more," she had said. _Well, the joke's on you, Rory_ , Jess thought bitterly. He could never be the sort of guy Rory wanted him to be. And God knows, he'd tried… The worst part was that, for all the rocky patches they'd gone through, it had seemed like things were finally starting to get really good for them up until the moment he stepped into Principal Merton's office.

He had ignored Rory's request to erase the message she left him the night of the Distillers concert. His curiosity had been too much for him and besides, he never _actually_ promised her he wouldn't listen to it, or so he justified it to himself. In the end, he didn't regret it, because otherwise he would have had no idea she was so unhappy. He'd been a little annoyed with her, honestly. What was he, a freaking mind-reader? How was he supposed to know what she wanted if she never said anything? He had assumed (wrongly, evidently) that she knew that he wasn't going to be the same type of boyfriend Dean had been, and frankly, that she would prefer it that way. Hadn't she always found Dean's constant attention and hanging-on stifling? Hadn't she begged Dean to leave her alone for one night so she could do _laundry_ , for God's sake?! He'd assumed that if she wanted to hang out, she'd call him. He conceded that his picking up extra night shifts on the fly would have made that more difficult, but Rory never said anything, so… He never really took any of Lorelai's warnings seriously- let's be honest, that woman found his very existence offensive. But apparently she'd actually been trying to help him get a clue. Huh.

But despite his frustration and confusion at Rory's sudden unwillingness to call him out for being an ass (She'd never held back before! He'd always found it a bit of a turn-on, actually...), he had made an effort. He rearranged his work schedule to make more time for her, made sure he was free on weekends. He still wasn't Dean (thank God!), but he thought they had started to find a rhythm that worked for them. And it had been really, really good.

It made his chest ache now to think about how happy he had been for a brief moment before the End. For the first time in his entire life he had begun to know what contentment felt like in those quiet evenings spent alone with Rory, where they could truly be themselves, thoughts and ideas flowing between them like an electrical current until they caught fire, her soft, warm body pressed close in his arms while their movie played forgotten in the background. In the end, they'd never even had sex, and yet Jess had never felt so intimately connected with anyone in his life. He had never before had the thought that he wouldn't wish to be anywhere else but where he was, but when it was just the two of them shutting out the world, he felt that. He'd suddenly found himself thinking about the future, making plans, calculating the distance between Stars Hollow and Yale, working all the extra shifts he could to save up money for gas, maybe even an apartment in New Haven… But it turned out he had been crunching the wrong numbers and didn't see the fatal flaw in his calculations until it was too late.

Spending more time with Rory had meant spending less time either at work or in class, and at the time it had seemed like an easy choice. His job represented freedom, independence, his means of building a life of his own, a future with Rory. School was a dead-end, a pointless formality he had no patience for. He had thought he'd just squeak by, put in the bare minimum required to get his diploma and get out, but he'd forgotten that the main reason he resented schedules was that he was crap at remembering to keep them. Given his track record, it shouldn't have come as such a surprise that he'd lost count, but he had been _so sure_ he'd been going enough. He should have known he would screw this up. Every time he was in the grip of an obsession, literary or otherwise, he forgot everything else until he resurfaced like Rip Van Winkle, to find the world changed around him. It was Dr. Frankenfurter strutting through his head leading a rousing chorus of "Let's do the Time Warp again!" In retrospect, he could of course see how short-sighted he had been. He'd only had a few months of school left; he should have done the time and then moved on with his life. But he had really thought he had it figured out… Turns out he wasn't as smart as he thought he was. He wasn't as smart as Rory thought he was. And once he had started making mistakes, he couldn't seem to stop making them.

He wanted to smash his head through the glass when he thought of Kyle's party. He'd spent the whole evening feeling paralyzed and trapped, desperately wracking his brains for any way out of this hole he had dug for himself, any way to avoid Rory seeing him as the failure and disappointment he really was, and then she'd found him. She'd been so sweet, so full of concern, and it only made him feel even more like crap that she was being so kind to him when he'd failed her so completely. He didn't know how to tell her, couldn't bear to see the disappointment in her eyes. And then she'd apparently gleaned from his silence and his distance that he was _tired_ of her! All he could do was kiss her, and that seemed to be a step in the right direction, judging from her reaction, so he pressed on. She _had_ to know. If he couldn't do anything else for her, he would at least leave her in no doubt of how much he wanted her, _needed_ her, was hopelessly addicted to her mind and her mouth and her slender softness- could _never_ get enough. He was so focused on his goal, so ready to drown himself in the sweet oblivion of her drugging kisses and the silkiness of her skin under his fingers, he barely heard her the first time. The second time, he had to admit he was in denial. He couldn't _possibly_ have gotten _this_ wrong too. He was so desperate to feel close to her and desperately clinging to his belief that she wanted him too. But the third time there was no mistaking the note of frightened anger in her voice and the way she tried to shove him away, and his humiliation and despair at making the wrong choice yet _again_ had exploded out of him with such rage and frustration that Rory had fled from him in tears. He had never hated himself more than at that moment.

He had done that. He had clumsily put the moves on her when she had only been trying to comfort him, and then had lashed out at her like a wounded animal when she quite reasonably objected to the time and place. He had put that look of hurt and confusion in her eyes. He wanted to punch himself, but Dean took care of that for him.

Dean. In the clear light of day, he could recognize that he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but in that moment, panicking in the knowledge he was losing her, seeing Dean sweep in ready to play knight-in-shining-armor had been too much for him to take. Of course. He'd been waiting for a chance like this, had _told_ Jess _to his face_ , and now Jess had handed it to him like the idiot he was.

He'd never felt entirely confident that Rory really wanted to be with him. She'd never actually chosen him over Dean and sometimes Jess wondered if they would've ever even gotten together if Dean hadn't gotten fed up and dumped her. He could never quite escape the nagging feeling that she regretted ending up with him, nor could he escape the feeling that he was always standing in "Mr. Perfect Boyfriend's" long shadow. Always being measured against him and always falling short. Despite his own private opinion that Dean was a boring, worryingly possessive, emotionally manipulative jerk, Rory refused to see him as anything but a paragon of virtue. Jess still felt the bitterness of learning that if Dean _had_ given him that black eye, he could have counted on his girlfriend taking the ex-boyfriend's side instead of his. He'd almost felt a savage sort of vindication that Dean had sucker-punched him right in front of Rory. So much for "Dean would never do that," huh, Rory? Of course, the fact that he'd deserved it stripped him of any sense of superiority he might otherwise have felt. Maybe she should have stayed with Dean after all. She saw Dean as a safe port in a storm, something she wanted and craved. Jess couldn't be that for her, not right now, not when he bore a closer resemblance to the storm itself. He was breaking apart on the rocks of his own failures, and he couldn't save her while he was drowning himself.

He had wanted to make her happy, had once thought he'd be able to, but once things had started to fall apart, he couldn't seem to stop hurting her, no matter how hard he tried. And then Luke. He'd managed to let down the only two people who'd ever believed in him- the only two people whose opinions _mattered_ to him, and he didn't know how to handle that.

Jimmy was just the icing on the cake. Of all the times for him to express a vague curiosity about the son he had fathered and then abandoned, he had to pick _now_. Jess didn't know what to do with the complicated mess of emotions seeing his father had left him with. Why did he feel so oddly bereft when the man bolted? It wasn't like he meant anything to him. He didn't even remember losing him the first time. But it was the timing of the thing, coming at a time when he was already ripped open and raw… He felt like an overloaded circuit. He'd shorted out. And now even Luke had gotten fed up with him and told him to get out. The one relative who gave a damn about him and he'd managed to ruin that too. One weekend. In one weekend, his life had completely collapsed and he'd lost everything and everyone he'd ever had. And he had no one to blame but himself.

He had to get out of here. No one wanted him here anyway. He had no home, no car, no future, no friends. He didn't even know who he was and what he wanted anymore. He'd tried to imagine his fate if he stayed, but all he could see was Rory's hurt face from Kyle's bedroom, replaying over and over again on an endless loop with each fresh disappointment. I promised I'd take you to prom, but I can't follow through. I told you I had everything under control at school, but I didn't. You thought I was smart, but I'm not. You thought I was special, but I'm not. Everyone told you that I was no good, unworthy, would only ever hurt you, and now you know the truth. I'm a loser, waste of potential waste of time waste of space. God help him, he didn't want to see it, couldn't bear to watch her grow to despise him. He was sure she'd be glad to be rid of him.

He wished he didn't care what she or Luke thought of him. Before he came to Stars Hollow, he had been used to being unwanted. Nobody expected him to amount to anything. It was a ridiculous image, but he had almost been like a hedgehog when he'd arrived… a tightly curled, prickly, impenetrable ball of hostility. But Rory and Luke had been slowly coaxing him open, exposing the soft vulnerable parts underneath, and now he was left defenseless and it was too late to protect himself. The leather motorcycle jacket was a poor substitute for the tough skin he used to have, but he strapped it on like armor nonetheless.

Sometimes when his despair and self-loathing threatened to consume him, he almost hated Rory and Luke for making him love them. He resented them for making him hope for more than he deserved, for expecting more than he was capable of giving, for making him believe it was possible. But he hated and resented himself most of all. He clung to his unanswered questions about his father like a lifeline. Jess didn't know who he was or what he wanted anymore, but he was going to find out.

 **A.N. I know what you're thinking... I was supposed to write another chapter of "School Spirit" instead. But Jess and Lane's musical banter is totally intimidating me, guys! I have to do them justice, but while I share their tendency towards obsessive enthusiasm, my own obsessions have run along different lines, so anyone knowledgeable about Classic Punk, please PM me because I need help! But in the meantime, this fic has been haunting me for a year, ever since Dylan's "It Ain't Me, Babe," reminded me so forcefully of how Jess must have been feeling at this moment. I know Jess doesn't generally care for folk music, but Bob Dylan is such a reclusive, ornery Beatnik (he hung out with Ginsberg!) that I have to believe he's an exception to the rule. This is probably as close to a "song fic" as I'll ever get. This was intensely personal for me to write, as I have been where Jess has been and have felt what he has felt. I believe this to be an accurate reflection of what Jess was thinking... That said, I don't necessarily believe in the reality of Jess' assessment of himself and his situation, because frankly, he's depressed and nearly suicidal, and that has a way of warping one's view of reality. He'll see his way in time. And so will you and I.**


End file.
